Advanced Search & Searchspring

[bzeltzer]

I'm looking to improve my site search and am wondering if anyone has any experience with either of these "apps" or something similar. I'd very much appreciate any feedback you can provide.

I'd like to know what kind of setup is involved and how much time it might take. I have around 4000 diverse products and noticed that on my site when someone searched for "hats" pages with the words hat didn't appear. I know that the keywords field would help with this but I think I'm ready to be a bit more serious about increasing conversions via search.

Thank You

[Barry]

Have you looked into the "Advanced Search" feature of 3Dcart (Settings/General/Store Settings then to Store Search Settings)?
This may be what you need.

You may want to re-consider the "keywords" field. If you don't want the "keywords" to automatically be your metatag-keywords, just fill in the meta info section for each item.

[bzeltzer]

Thanks for the reply. I've used that section. I'm looking for something a little more robust that will allow people to drill down better. The advanced search I'm wondering about is the 3dcart "app" rather than the built-in setting.

[lukiegames]

We are using Searchspring. You can checkout our site at lukiegames.com and see what it can do (although we have not yet implemented all the functionality).

We got it for advanced search engine but also the filtering. The reason we switched from Fusionbot to Searchspring was that Searchspring integrates directly with your categories as well. For example if you go to Buy NES Nintendo Video Games Systems Accessories and Guides! you can see the filters on the left. Our customers can sort by platform, age rating, in stock or out of stock, etc. It uses the same filters for search as it does for browsing by categories so you don't have to try to setup custom filters for all your items separately. This gives your customers a much more consistent experience.

Jesse

[bzeltzer]

thanks for the info. Your site is very shop-able. Do you get much benefit from the analytics? Also, I noticed that when a person searches for plurals (controllers), the products are returned in the search results. Do you specify keywords or is that an automatic function of the plugin?